Friday, September 03, 2010

Escort.

Tonight, I take my daughter and her two best friends out to dinner in the Big City of Fort Worth, TX. Well, it's awfully big, to us.

My daughter loves a restaurant there, and I'll be taking her there for her 12th birthday. She was allowed to invite her bestest friends. I'll be along to pay the check, and such. But basically, it's a first Girls' Night Out, for her. We'll walk the Stockyards or Sundance Square, or whatever.

I'm happy to blend in, and not make eye contact, as I'm sure she desires. Each girl carries a cell phone. I carry a cell phone and a gun or two.

On the way in, I think that I shall make clear my expectations about expected response to directions. My elder daughter knows them. But the other girls may not fully get that run, and get down mean exactly that. In my family, we also have a benign-sounding danger phrase, which I suppose that I will let them in on.

I, of all people, recognize that the world is actually a safer place than we give it credit for being, and I don't much think about these things, until I get put in charge of Other People's Children.

But when I take a group of kids downtown on a Friday night, I gird myself a bit tighter.

8 Comments:

Hmmm...responsible chaperones for Young Ladies. An old idea, but a good one that should never have fallen out of fashion. The world needs more dads like you. I hope you daughter knows how lucky she is. If she doesn't yet, she will.

You touch on a topic that is, suprisingly, totally undercovered in various forums: defensive tactics with your kids present. I think you would be offering a useful service if you could share the results of your reflections on the topic.

So, how would having, say, an 8 - 15 yr old along with you change things? Having more than one? Does it change how you assess threats? When do you tell them to run vs. get down? What training and understandings do you have with them? How did you decide they were old enough to take an active role?

Something I've found handy is making it clear to my wife, and my daughter when she's old enough, that we should use simple things to communicate that something isn't right. Any statement that would sound perfectly normal to others but would make no sense to us can be such a signal; saying that a deceased relative dropped by, for example, would let me know that the alarm wasn't just accidentally triggered, while not letting anyone in the house with her know that she's just confirmed a duress situation to me. Any statement like that when we're out in public means it's time for at least condition orange, and if one of us gives a command afterward, there's no time to question it.